


Finding My Religion

by spikedpoppies



Series: season two in my own design (where nothing hurts) [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon-Compliant, Family Bonding, Fluff, Gen, Good siblings, Humor, Jewish Character, No Slash, Not Beta Read, a bit of angst, klaus is a hot mess, mostly five-centric, no beta we die like men, supportive family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-11-21 16:51:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spikedpoppies/pseuds/spikedpoppies
Summary: Five read through the Torah at age sixteen by candles and firelight with a Hebrew to English dictionary in his tent when it was too cold to go outside. A hibernation of sorts.And when spring came and he could go out for more than a few hours at a time, he took his teachings with him.or, a place for me to post my headcanon(s) of Number Five being an old Jewish man.





	1. apocalypse- 16

**Author's Note:**

> I am not Jewish myself, so I am really, really sorry if I get things wrong or offend people. I promise that is not my intention and I do not wish any harm onto the Jewish community. Please tell me if I am doing things wrong and I will do my absolute best to resolve them quickly and well. Thank you.

It began roughly three years after Five had stranded himself in the apocalypse. At that point he had read almost everything the library had had to offer on theoretical and practical physics, wilderness survival techniques, and any book containing the word “time” in the title.  
Five was shaking in the darkness, another harsh winter was coming and the library offered meager shelter at best. The animals around him were already changing to adapt to a environment of extremes as a result of a shredded ozone layer.   
Five was in the midst of a fascinating ongoing study on pigeons and their adaptation through generations following a extinction level event. Already he was seeing thicker feathers, more predatory behaviour, and a loss of agility following the collapse of a food chain that left them on the bottom. In moments of fancy, Five imagined his brain going through a evolution of sorts to determine more predatory behaviour too. He imagined the thought patterns that died out, like respect for the dead, and those that survived: the art of compartmentalization, thievery, and newfound respect for scavengers and decomposers. But evolution doesn’t work without anyone around. Five is not a series of generations, happenstance and death of the unfit somehow coordinating into a species that can survive better than its predecessors. He is one man, one boy, alone in the freezing chill that is early november in the apocalypse.   
“You need a hobby.”  
“What?” Five said, whipping around to face Delores. To an outside observer, she was the picture of calm, but Five had practice reading her face. She was annoyed, and worried.   
“Or something. You need something other than the apocalypse. You keep reading books about math and time and that’s fine, it is, but it’s not healthy.”  
Five had not slept for a week at that point. Delores was overcompensating her facial expressions for him, worried that his blurry vision wouldn’t be able to read her. Silly Delores.   
“I’m not silly, I’m dead serious. You need something other than the apocalypse.”  
Shit. He’d said that out loud. Welp, he was not going to win any arguments for the next couple of months. Insulting Dolores was a terrible tactical maneuver. 

It started about a month after that.   
The religion section of the library was, curiously, the most well preserved. Delores thought that was funny, in a dark sort of way.   
It started because Five was lonely, so deeply lonely at sixteen and he could remember his mother’s voice as she told him stories about the origin of his name in her sotto voice, late at night when he couldn't sleep. He remembered the soft rise and fall of Hebrew as he and his siblings learned countless languages to help them on missions. Klaus had always been the best at languages, switching effortlessly from Xhosa to Russian and back again. Back then it pissed him off, the way Four had a better grasp of linguistics even as he spoke Cantonese through clouds of marijuana smoke. But Five had nothing but time now, and years of solitude had softened his competitiveness.   
Five read through the Torah at age sixteen by candles and firelight with a Hebrew to English dictionary in his tent when it was too cold to go outside. A hibernation of sorts.   
And when spring came and he could go out for more than a few hours at a time, he took his teachings with him.   
In the apocalypse, ritual and pattern becomes important. Without it, you are liable to fall into days of drinking or self-pity. Five may not have a code of ethics anymore, but in a world where the only rules he has to follow are his own, why not follow those that make him feel more connected to his past, his family, the ancestry that worked for so long for him to be here?   
He starts the day with prayer. It becomes a part of the day-to-day ritual of living. Even if he lives in a world of chaos and ashes, he can have something to ground him, a schedule to rely on, no matter how loose. Five knows about the placebo effect, and the side effects of a life of solitude, but at some undefined point he had started to believe, to hope, to have faith. Judaism became more than a self-soothing mechanism, it became a part of him.   
Besides, this way he could pretend his beard was there by choice, not because no one had taught him to shave before he left, and that he didn't touch anyone because he was orthodox, not because there was no one to touch.


	2. unfucking family relations!!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is, surprising exactly no one, Vanya that notices first.

It was now two weeks since the not-pocalypse, as the Hargreeves had taken to so aptly calling it. Things were tense, but getting less tense by the minute. By group consensus, the general vibe was to unfuck things via time travel and healthy relationships.  
On the unfucking things schedule was family bonding, an essential to nobody feeling neglected enough that they destroyed the moon and/or world.  
And family bonding in a group of paranoid ex-superheroes led to what was essentially close range surveillance. 

It is, surprising exactly no one, Vanya that notices first.  
Vanya had noted that Five had been a little strange since he came back, but most of that was typical Five strangeness. Hoarding guns and canned food was explained away easily enough, a lifetime of carrying out assassinations and trying not to starve to death would do that to a fella.  
The way the family often found him sleeping in cabinets, the way he’d lapse into a transatlantic accent for hours at a time, and the weekly break-ins at Gimbel Brothers to change Delores’ outfit and have a heart-to-heart were, well, weird, but no weirder than the family had been for the past thirty years. 

It starts small, so small she can write it off as more of Five’s typical oddities. The way he never eats pork, how he dresses nicer on Saturdays but never seems to go anywhere, the quiet murmurs that slip out from under his bedroom door a hour before breakfast.  
Observance, she muses, is a side effect of being raised not to be seen or heard. 

She notices Five talking to Mom in a sunny kitchen one morning after a breakfast hardly touched, and she noticed how he never got bacon in his egg smiley face after that, and how he got orange juice with his dinner instead of milk. 

She collects these oddities and puts them aside, content with having a family, no matter how strange, until she and Five are moving her out of her old apartment.  
They’re the only ones without prior responsibilities that day, and every time Vanya goes back to the apartment she can feel Leonard- no, Harold, like a itch under her skin. She wonders if this is what Klaus means when he says he can feel a place is haunted.  
The apartment is nearly cleared, and she stands in the living room, saying goodbye to a shitty apartment that served her well, when she hears quiet conversation across the hall.  
She leaves her apartment, feeling incredibly small, and tiptoes across the hall and to the left slightly, she stands in the doorway of an apartment that smells of dust and gardenia perfume and cigarettes. She stands in this doorway as her tiny, assassin-killing, world-feared, knee-socked brother sits across from Mrs. Kowalski in a pink, wingback chair with Mr. Puddles in his lap and grins as she speaks rapid-fire Yiddish, accentuating her statements with thin, liver-spotted hands.  
Vanya stalks quietly back across the hall, the lights swinging with quiet contentment. Five guards his happiness like smaug guarding treasure, so seeing him smiling instead of smirking was surprising, but welcomed. She reminiscences back to their childhood, when Five used to give his smiles so much more easily, when his jokes were more about making her feel happy than making someone else feel small.  
She takes a look around her apartment, and calls Five in to carry the last box to her hatchback downstairs. Vanya then asks Mrs. Kowalski about the boy she was just talking to.  
“Such a charming young man, your nephew,” she doesn't correct Mrs. Kowalski. Vanya has found, in twelve years of living here, it’s easier that way. “a little quiet though, and he talks like he’s from the old country, did he just get over? Such a sweet boy. Needs some friends his own age.”  
She doesn't specify which old country, and Vanya is happy that she doesn't have to make her lie more elaborate than it needs to be. Vanya also carefully bites back the urge to reply that her brother is closer to Mrs. Kowalski’s seventy two than her own thirty, and that they should compare stories about ‘these gosh-darn millennials’. 

Vanya keeps it quiet. That’s something she and Five still have in common; an appreciation for the almost-silence, so that one can listen to the sound of the cars rushing by murmured conversations and footsteps blending into a homogenized whisper of sound. 

She takes him out for coffee a few weeks afterwards, in Borough Park. It’s pricier than her usual area, but it’s worth it to see him order rugelach with his black coffee, and to share the white noise of the cafe as people swarm around them. She drinks her tea, and he sips at his coffee, and it feels like they are a island of calm in a sea of energy. He grins at her, quick and hesitant, when his pastry gets there, and she smiles back, accepting it as the small gift that it is. 

She gives him a bag of gelt, on the first day of hanukkah that year, and it stays between them. A silent and comfortable bond of I understand, I know, and I accept you. 

Klaus finds out next, to the surprise of everyone.


	3. knitting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A purple yarmulke with orange, yellow, and red hot-rod flames in Delores’ hand.   
> Now, see, it was personal.

Klaus has been more stable since getting sober, levitating about a foot off the ground whenever he’s not really thinking about it, and often making ghosts visible so that he can chat to them without being escorted out of public places by security.   
The family has all met Dave, who turns out to be just as bad if not a worse of an influence than Klaus, and Ben is a regular at Thursday family game nights, (which end just as badly as could be expected almost every time.)   
But despite all of his positive progress, Klaus is still, well, Klaus. 

So when his siblings find him crouching like a gargoyle on the bannister at eight in the morning after being up all night, speaking in a low, quick mumble to multiple points in the room, they don’t sweat it. Luther ensures he has three points of contact to the railing so he won’t fall, Diego presses a cup of chamomile into his hand, and Allison ruffles his hair on her way out the door. 

He seems to be thinking very hard, which is a thing that the family has come to respect. There is a 50/50 chance that the resulting idea will be brilliant, like the time Klaus relocated and rewired all of the security cameras to face outdoors instead of in, a move that helped every one’s PTSD, or incredibly bad, like the time Klaus bought out an entire cobbler’s workshop in order to design and manufacture his own shoe line. 

That is why, when Klaus suddenly leaps from his crouch during lunch, almost killing himself by startling a team of ex-superheroes and falling off of a railing, exclaiming “HE’S JEWISH!” and running, head over gangly heels for his room, no one is really sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

\----------------------------------------A Week Later------------------------------------------

Five has been finding yarmulkes everywhere.   
Every. Fucking. Where.   
But not in normal spots, like on top of the table, or hung up somewhere. No, that would be too simple. Too boring. But that’s okay, Five has always enjoyed a mystery.

The space on top of the fridge where he likes to observe the goings on of the kitchen, (a sniper’s habit, sue him), has a yarmulke shoved down the side.   
His secret box of gun oil has a yarmulke gently resting on top of it.  
There is a veritable rainbow in the glovebox of his van, now parked in the courtyard of the academy. 

They are all knitted, and they seem to improve in quality with each one he finds. There are paisley ones, plaid ones, neon ones, ones made out of fluffy pink yarn, and odder still, ones that seem tailor made for him: pleasing shades of burgundy and deep blue and grey to match or compliment his ties and pocket squares, slightly felted to provide a better fit. Five finds himself strangely touched, and deeply uncomfortable with the feeling of it.   
There are also some with complex equations or puns embroidered across the back, but those are few and far between. 

Five had already asked Vanya, and she was as confused as he was. (She also could not knit worth a damn after Five had insisted that she prove it.)   
Five was fine to leave it, no, for real, (Perhaps some odd programming feature of Mom’s? Her circuits were, of course, more than a little fried, and he had to get on that, really, but it was sweet that she cared--), until he found it. 

A purple yarmulke with orange, yellow, and red hot-rod flames in Delores’ hand.   
(In Gimbel Brothers. After hours. With no security footage.)  
Now, see, it was personal. 

Five dedicates a week to finding the culprit, mainly by tailing all his siblings. 

Luther is a dead end, so much so that Five almost cries from boredom at the sheer normalcy of his schedule. He spends his days going to the gym, going to therapy, and going out with Allison. Five notes that Luther does occasionally stop by Diego’s gym for some light sparring and a beer, and Five is pleased by the effort put into making them a real family. 

Allison is much the same, with a different therapist, power control and suppression lessons with Vanya, and ASL classes at the local community centre. She decided to continue therapy past the court mandated date, and Vanya’s small grin cemented that decision. 

Vanya just shyly waves at Five from where ever he’s watching, which is truly unnerving when one of them is a highly trained covert assassin. She seems to appreciate the company, however, and Five makes a note to spend more time with her when this is all over. 

Diego has a day-planner.   
Five swallows his disbelief but the man sticks to it very strictly.   
At 0400, Diego wakes up, assembles a healthy breakfast, and reads the paper while eating. He then showers, shaves, and does laundry.   
From 0530 to 0630, he practices speech therapy in front of a mirror, closing his eyes when it gets too frustrating. He mops the gym until 0700, when he opens it, and then he works out for roughly three hours. At 10 o’clock, he works on his car, (badly, Five notes, and that’s from the viewpoint of a assassin. Diego does things to his car that would make a mechanic weep and beat him upside the head.), and at 11, he arrives at the academy to chat with Mom, eat lunch with his siblings, and take a nap. At 1800, he returns to and closes the gym and bookkeeps for the night’s fights. At 2100 he kicks everyone out, and turns on his police scanning radio.   
Five approves of this schedule, it accounts for eight hours of sleep, regular meals, exercise, and most importantly: does not leave time for knitting. Or worse, schemes about knitting. 

Klaus, however.

Five tails him for two days straight, (how this man survived on the street, he’ll never know), until he catches something suspicious. At first, he thinks it’s drug activity, but Five remembers that the only vices of Klaus nowadays are margaritas with him, (and the “spooky smokers social club”, but that’s neither here nor there. Everyone wants to be in the umbrella academy until they realize that it means dealing with your floppy brother and his thirty-strong posse of stoned ghosts wanting discount chinese food at 2pm on a Tuesday.)  
But still, the way Klaus looks both ways twitchily, (but never up), his hands wrapped tight around a opaque plastic bag, and how he enters his room on tiptoes--- well, it doesn’t look great. 

Klaus puts the bag down, closes all of his curtains, and locks the door. Five is curling his hands in anticipation of slapping some speedball out of Klaus’, when he opens the bag to reveal hot pink yarn and metallic purple needles. 

Five watches in stunned silence as his idiot brother quickly knits a yarmulke, casts it aside, grabs another ball of yarn out of seemingly thin air, and casts on. The first yarmulke starts to be embroidered with turquoise thread by invisible hands, and Klaus glances over and murmurs “Nice choice, Dave,” as if this situation was remotely acceptable or normal. 

“What,”  
Klaus yelps and falls off his bed, quickly whipping his head to the top of his wardrobe, where a very angry 13 (58) year old is sitting  
“-do you think you are doing.”

“Uh. Knitting?”

Approximately twelve minutes later, Five knows the truth.   
Klaus had, through completely random and unfounded curiosity, figured out that Five was jewish. “But I didn't wanna like, out you, man. I figured you had some weird, Five-y reason for keeping it hush-hush, but I wanted to make sure you knew that you were like, accepted? I guess? So I thought I’d make you some of these neat little hats! I thought maybe if I made the right one you’d be able to start wearing them and maybe tell the fam. It was like, a code. Like, “hey Five, I know your secret, and it’s okay!” Sorta like when you got me those rainbow socks when I was 11, remember?”

“Klaus,” Five said, “I am not ashamed of being Jewish. I just fail to see how it is any of your business.”   
“BECAUSE YOU’RE MY BABY-”  
“Fifty-eight year old”  
“-- TEENSY-TINY EENY-WEENY BROTHER AND YOU NEED TO FEEL LOVED!”

Klaus was crying great big crocodile tears at this point. The embroidery next to him stopped, and Five could almost feel Dave’s glare. 

“Fine, fuck, whatever. I’ll wear them. But only sometimes. And none of your neon monstrosities, I’m a man of taste.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this may end up being longer than 4 chapters... whoops :D   
> anyways, working some of y'all's ideas into the next chapter, stay posted! I really appreciate the feedback I've been getting, it helps me so much!   
> hope you've enjoyed, feel free to leave suggestions or critiques or just random screeching!   
> I'll be back in probably about three days, on that spring break lyfe baby!!


	4. religion w/ brothers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From there on out, everyone kind of knew.

From there on out, everyone kind of knew.  
Diego, now the unofficial designated driver for the household, would carpool in rare silence with Five and Klaus on Saturday mornings. First, to the synagogue for Five. 

It had taken Five a long time to find a synagogue he was comfortable with. Everything had seemed to be too much: too much noise, touching, too loud. He had thought back to quiet mornings in his bedroom, in the dust and bright sun of the apocalypse, in the in the shitty motel room The Commission had provided.

(His partners never said anything about the extra time he took in the morning after one of them had come back short two fingers. The Commission hadn't cared. They just made sure Five had the Sabbath off and kosher field rations. After all, who were they to judge their best killer? And it wasn't like Five had cut off his trigger fingers, just the pinkie and ring. Acceptable losses, you understand.)

Five had eventually settled on a early service, the calm light of the sun reaching it’s gentle fingers over the horizon as he and his siblings drove in, the static of the radio the only sound. It was given in quiet hebrew and sign language, helpful for the days that Klaus couldn't hear for all the screaming, the nights where Diego had damaged his eardrums on patrol, and the times Five couldn't bear the noise swarming him.   
The people there were understanding, the only ones who got up early enough were people getting off the night shift: nurses, janitors, cab drivers, and cashiers, all exhausted, or old-timers with too much time on their hands, or veterans and others with worn-out clothes who flinched at loud noises. It wasn't a close-knit community, but ever since the early prayer had started it was getting there.   
Five was, happy, for lack of a better word. He wasn't worming into a old community, trying to find a place. He was growing into one that was entirely new. Not transplanted into a new garden, but raising from the soil with his newly sprouted fellows. 

He drank coffee with the seniors after the service, swearing up and down that the thick caffeinated sludge served in the cafe they frequented was the only decent coffee in the entire city. He would never admit it, but he could be found helping the seniors up and down the steps of the synagogue, reminiscing on how he knew about the pains of old joints until they swatted him with their canes and told him to complain when he was older.   
He would talk faster than Diego would’ve thought possible with the night-workers, flipping from Yiddish to Hebrew to English to ASL and back again within the blink of an eye, always up-to-date on the latest traffic for the cabbies.  
On one particular morning he sat next to a young man with terrified eyes and dog tags for the entire service. He never said anything about it to anyone, but Klaus knit the man a yarmulke in military green and gave it to him next Saturday. 

After they all piled into Diego’s car, the next stop was the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe for the 10am mass. Diego would try to get there early by taking the most nerve-wracking routes through the city, because he was a usher.   
Diego loved his church, he loved helping abuelitas and the way the congregation could be heard together when they recited psalms. He didn't come as often as he should have, but now that he was driving Five, he thought a regular stop-in couldn't hurt. 

For all that Diego looked a menacing vigilante, he was the church’s favourite. As he crossed the threshold, he seemed to drop the shell, posture becoming ever so slightly more relaxed. Always quick with a kind word or a helping hand, “Un hombre tan amable, nuestro Diego.”   
Of course, from anyone else, the compliments would be cut off halfway through by a stainless steel knife. Here, kind words from old women and new immigrants alike only caused the tips of his ears to turn bright red. 

Klaus would direct the group to seemingly random locations, picking up salt from the back of a restaurant in Queens, crystals from a upscale pagan shop, or chicken bones from a specialty butcher in Washington Heights. And Diego used to complain until he saw Klaus sitting in a triangle drawn from chalk, hugging a ten year old Vietnamese boy with no body from the waist down.

Five and Diego would then accompany him into these places, watching as he was bathed in sage smoke in a back room, or as his withdrawal-fueled tremors stilled in a Casa de Santos just outside of Harlem.   
They both knew the look that passed over Klaus’ face in these moments, the look of being connected to something deeper. Klaus might not be religious like Five or Diego, but he certainly felt it the same way. Unforgettable rituals in foreign languages on Saturdays with people Klaus all seemed to know became as deeply entrenched as Five’s daily prayer or Diego’s rosary. 

Diego had the entirety of every Saturday morning blocked out on his day planner as “religion w/ brothers”, and Five will deny to his dying breath that it made him cry a little. 

Grace forces all of the children into their best clothing and all the boys into one of Klaus’ yarmulkes on the morning of Five’s Tvilah.   
They are an odd sight at Temple that morning, a small woman in a suit next to a man openly cosplaying Nick Fury, a sobbing goth being comforted by a translucent man in a hoodie, superstar Allison Hargreeves with a awkward bodybuilder on her arm, and a perfectly normal blonde woman with red lipstick sitting ramrod straight at the end. 

They decide, silently unanimous, that it’s worth it for the look of childlike joy that comes across Five’s face like a wave when he leaves the temple as Fievel Hamesh Hargreeves, Five for short.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The synagogue Five visits is entirely fictional, but the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a real place in New York, but the 10am mass happens on Sundays in reality. But we can pretend! 
> 
> Shoutout to StrangerInThisStrangeLand for their suggestion on Five's hebrew name!
> 
> I feel that Diego is definitely catholic with the sheer amount of guilt he projects, but I settled on Our Lady of Guadalupe because a) Diego deserves some links to his heritage as well, and b) this continues his link to maternal figures as established in the show and the first work in this series.   
> I'm also just obsessed wit the idea of Five getting along well with seniors? He's just a very old man on the inside. 
> 
> Un hombre tan amable, nuestro Diego  
> Such a kind young man, our Diego
> 
> Casa de Santos is also known as a house-temple, and it is a place for rituals and ceremonies in the practice of Santeria. 
> 
> Tvilah is the full submersion of one's body in a mikveh (a specially constructed bath) to become pure. 
> 
> this is the final chapter i had planned, but I may write the Hargreeves having a Passover Seder at the request of a commenter (my guy Ash :) ), because that sounds awesome and hilarious in equal parts.  
>  As always, I hope you've enjoyed, please let me know if I've gotten something horribly wrong with the Jewish experience or Judaism in general, comments and kudos make me ever so happy, and stay posted for the next bit in this lil series!

**Author's Note:**

> There will be more chapters! I am open to suggestions but I have ideas and stuff, so like, don't worry. Thank you for reading, please feel free to leave any type of comment, or drop some kudos!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Who You Are](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19191205) by [awkwardblogger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardblogger/pseuds/awkwardblogger)




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